In order to avoid damage to maintenance personnel caused by unexpected equipment start-up or hazardous energy during equipment maintenance, the isolation and Lockout-Tagout (LOTO) of the hazardous energy is an important means to ensure the safety of the personnel and the equipment.
Isolating elements such as circuit breakers can isolate hazardous energy, but are bulky and costly. Even the size of the isolating element is reduced with development, it still cannot meet increasingly higher requirements of the industrial environment on the miniaturization of equipment. Moreover, the inconvenience of remote operation of the isolating elements also limits the development of LOTO solutions.
In high-power electricity conversion systems and energy storage systems, multiple hazardous energy sources often exist in the same system, for example, multiple battery strings are connected in parallel by DC conversion modules, and each circuit loop has a higher voltage. Therefore, when high-voltage isolation and LOTO are needed, more switching elements and LOTO elements are needed to disconnect and isolate all the circuits, which greatly increases the complexity, cost and management difficulty of the system.
It should be noted that the information disclosed in the above background section is only for enhancement of understanding the background of the present disclosure and therefore can include other information that does not form the prior art that is already known to those of ordinary skills in the art.